Setting Up a Site-to-Site VPN using a Linksys RV082 and OpenWrt/Openswan on a WRT54GS

After a week of trying out several different types of VPNs (PPTP, SSTP, IPSEC) at my new office, I finally figured out a solution to setup a WAN between my Linksys WRT54GSv3 and a Linksys RV082 business router. The solution was initially presented by Joe Kelly at NerdBoys.com but I couldn’t get it to actually work until tonight.

Being a big fan of DD-WRT, I was hoping that I would be able to use it for my IPSEC VPN but DD-WRT only supports OpenVPN, not Openswan, which is what I need to connect to the remote RV082 router.

The techniques provided by Joe worked but the software did not. Apparently, I had to downgrade to OpenWrt from his suggested RC6 to RC4. With RC6, I could establish a tunnel successfully, but I could not ping and traffic did not go through either side. I thought it was my routing table but RC4 has the same routing table and it works perfectly.

Setting up a tunnel is actually easier than I expected — I had to modify just 3 files on my OpenWrt install and add one tunnel to my RV082. So here’s what my network looks like:

Chrissy is a Cloud and Datacenter Management & Data Platform MVP who has worked in IT for over 20 years. She is the creator of the popular SQL PowerShell module dbatools, and holds a number of certifications, including those relating to SQL Server, Linux, SharePoint and network security. You can follow her on Twitter at @cl.

One comment on “Setting Up a Site-to-Site VPN using a Linksys RV082 and OpenWrt/Openswan on a WRT54GS”

Thanks for the plug. I'm glad you got it to work! Openswan is a pain in the butt to configure and troubleshoot. I've found OpenVPN much easier to work with. On the other hand, Openswan seems to use less CPU than OpenVPN on the WRT54G series. Six of one, half a dozen of the other, I guess.